The guards keep watch here day and night. If the commander leaves the castle the garrison are empowered to kill him, or at least to exile him for ever. Abaza, the rebel, besieged this town with an hundred thousand men, and took possession of the lower town, but wounded by a cannon shot from the upper castle, he was obliged to return to Erzerúm; the commander ever since has been prohibited from leaving the castle, and the watchmen all night long cry, Yegdir-allah, One is God! It has no ditch on one side on account of the rocks, and it is not easily to be attacked by mines because its quarters rise one behind the other. The four enclosures have eighteen hundred battlements, and its circumference is four thousand paces. On the east side is a place of pilgrimage situated on a hill, it is called Khizrlik; this hill looks over the town, which is of no consequence as it is not within gun-shot distance. The inner castle is defended by sixty-eight guns, but none of them are large. The houses number six hundred and are all terraced, but have neither gardens nor vineyards; the old mosque was formerly a convent. The lower town was surrounded with a wall by Ahmed Páshá against the rebels. It has four gates, and its circumference on the three sides, on which it does not join the citadel, is six thousand paces. On the east side of the superior castle you descend into the valley of Khizrlik by a road leading down for fetching water. In the inner castle are cisterns and magazines; but in the lower town are no cisterns, because water is in abundance, there being an hundred and seventy fountains, three thousand wells, seventy-six mosques, those of Ahmed Páshá and Hájí Beirám the saint, having been built by the great Sinán, fifteen convents of Dervishes with mihráb (mosques) the greatest of them is that of Hájí Bairám, where three hundred Dervishes of his order follow the rules of their founder. Their first patron is Khoja Abd-ul-Kádír Jeilání, by whom they ascend to the prophet; in Rúmelí they are called also Hamzeví from Sheikh Hamza. There is likewise a fine convent of Mevlevís founded by Ahmed Páshá. The colleges are richly endowed, three houses for lectures on tradition, an hundred and eighty schools for boys, two hundred baths, seventy palaces with gardens; all these buildings are of brick not stone, and covered with earth instead of with bricks, six thousand six hundred and sixty houses, and two hundred sebíl-kháneh or establishments for distributing water. The shops are two thousand, and there is an elegant bezestán with four gates with chains; the market places are almost all on elevated spots; the coffee houses and barber’s-shops are always crowded; the public places and streets are paved with white stones. Its divines, poets, and learned and pious men are innumerable, although it is a Turkish town, it counts more than two thousand boys and girls who know the Korán by heart; some thousand also